


Only a Change of Time

by DoubleApple



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Clubbing, Draco pov, Drinking, M/M, Older Characters, True Love, Weather, more tea than alcohol though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-06-26 03:09:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15654522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleApple/pseuds/DoubleApple
Summary: Sometimes, finding love takes many seasons.





	Only a Change of Time

**Author's Note:**

> For those of us who found love when we were well into adulthood, and for everyone who’s still looking. <3
> 
> Thanks as always to my incredibly wonderful beta, Maccadole, and to slytherinvalues for this beautiful prompt: It was a sunny day when they first held hands. It was a foggy day when they first went on a date. But it was a rainy day when they first kissed. And a starry night when they first made love.
> 
> All characters property of J.K. Rowling and Scholastic; I own nothing.

Draco is 18. He’s back at Hogwarts, finishing his eighth year, and he goes down to the lake when he needs to be alone. The almost-summer sun is too bright now, nearly punishing, which is why he likes it. 

Draco doesn’t know how to act anymore, how to be. His childhood persona has fallen to pieces; the old rules of his old world have failed him. Having to live every single moment of his life feels painful, every decision and its consequence both too banal and too important. There are too many details. Every breath is a burden. 

When Harry sits down next to him, Draco can’t find it within himself to be surprised. They're both silent for a long time. 

Draco hadn’t realised how deeply he’d assumed he’d die in the war. Living, being alive, leaves him oddly adrift. It’s almost like he’s disappointed, although of course he’s not. Or shouldn’t be. 

He finds himself voicing these thoughts, all of them and more. He knows he’s a fool for saying them out loud. To Harry Potter, no less, of all bloody people, until Harry says—

“Same.” 

Then he swallows like it hurts, clears his throat, and repeats it: “Same.”

Harry reaches over and touches the back of Draco’s hand. Draco only flinches a little before he flips his palm up and twines his fingers with Harry’s. They just look at each other, into each other’s open faces, and breathe together. 

Draco can’t hold Harry’s gaze for long. It hurts just like staring into the sun. Instead he squints out at the flat glare of the lake and focuses on Harry’s solid grip. 

Harry’s hand is a Seeker’s hand. It’s searched so often and lost so much, even though their lives are just beginning. 

Same. 

***

Draco is 19 and then he’s 20. 

He is 21, dancing in a Muggle club, pressed up against some bloke whose name he never asked. Maybe if the music is loud enough, he’ll be okay. 

Draco is 22, in bed with another bloke whose name he never asked. It’s not the first time, or the second, or the tenth. When he wakes up, his mouth feels like it’s been scoured with sand, and his head is so cloudy from smoke and vodka that he can barely move it. 

Draco is 23, 24, 26, in his first real relationship, with an American he met online. They like each other well enough. They go out to posh dinners and drink good wine, posing as adults, and then they go out to the clubs and sleep til afternoon the next day. They fetch sausage rolls and Sunday papers and bring them back to bed. 

The American thinks Draco’s Dark Mark is some sort of odd tattoo and doesn’t ask questions. He’s a decent sort, far too nice for Draco, according to Pansy. She’s joking but she’s right; there’s no edge, no excitement, no flicker of danger. They part as friends when the American goes back to the States. They don’t keep in touch. Draco thinks of Harry every day, wonders where he is. 

Draco is 27, 29, 32. His twenties slide away with a sigh of relief. He’s living in a rented flat in London, a nice one, working up potions at St Mungo’s. Pansy and Blaise live nearby. Draco still goes out to the clubs with them, sometimes, and he still pulls, but not as often as before. He enjoys his nights alone now. Sometimes. 

One foggy afternoon just after his thirty-fourth birthday, he hears an owl tap at his window. Draco isn’t expecting any messages. He wrenches up the sticky windowsill and a tawny owl appears, large and unfamiliar.

The note it carries asks if he fancies a drink. It’s signed “HP.” Draco would know the scratchy writing anywhere. 

His own owl, small and sleek and white, eyes the visitor suspiciously from his perch. 

“It’s all right, Mika,” Draco says. He’s not at all sure that’s true. 

He feeds them each a treat and fetches a quill. Yes, he writes, and sends the owl back out into the fog. The air is thick and heavy with it, like the inside of a cloud. 

Hours later, they’re seated across from one another at a little café where Draco used to go with the American. Draco wants to say Harry looks the same, but he doesn’t. He’s worse for wear, grey in his hair and exhaustion in the lines on his face. 

There’s quite a lot of wine. Draco matches Harry glass for glass, their old competitive spark kindled somewhere deep down inside. Harry laughs, often, but his eyes stay sad.

Is this a date? Draco wonders after they finish their second bottle and Harry is scraping up the last of a gigantic tiramisu. Does it count if we didn’t say so?

“Actually yes,” Harry tells him, this is a date, but it doesn’t properly count because he’s leaving for Romania the next morning. 

“I’m going to care for dragons with Charlie Weasley,” he says. 

He can’t be serious. Harry may be drunk, but he’s watching Draco so intently. He’s an Auror at heart, no matter how many dragons he may find in Romania. 

“I can’t be an Auror anymore.”

Can’t or won’t, Draco wonders. 

“Won’t,” Harry concedes as he drains his glass. “Don’t want to.”

Draco allows himself to feel one single pang of loss, one thought for what might have been if Harry stayed. He spares another thought for wasted time and the way Harry had held his hand, all those years ago, and then he straightens in his seat. He wants to reach across the table to take Harry’s hand now, but it seems too far away. 

Draco is so soused by the end of the night that he can barely remember his own name, but he’ll remember those piercing green eyes on a foggy street corner, telling him goodbye. 

***

Draco is 35, 36, then he’s 40. Overnight he believes himself to be old, although he knows he’s not. 

He feels as though too much life has happened for him, happened to him. He’s sore and stiff when he first wakes up in the morning. 

He gives up drinking, mostly, and takes up an expensive tea habit. Mika dies of old age and Draco is impossibly sad, actual grief pressing down on him for months. He’s sadder than he was when Lucius died. 

Draco is 41, 42. He’s saved up some money and he buys his own tiny cottage in a little town by the sea, the furthest possible thing from the Manor he could find. He gets to know the locals, imagines himself becoming one, and begins to fix up the cottage. With the help of a Muggle carpenter, he knocks down a wall to let in the morning light and puts in a skylight to let in the moon. 

Having to live every single moment of his life, having to breathe every breath — it no longer seems painful, exactly, but Draco is fairly certain he hasn’t found joy and fulfillment either. He does well at work and gets on well with his colleagues. His Mark has long since faded from black to gray, the color of washed-out ink. Indelible but harmless. It hardly ever aches anymore. 

Draco is 44. The day after his birthday, a massive rainstorm sweeps in. It’s just gone noon on a Thursday, but the clouds make it seem like midnight. 

Draco’s banked a huge fire, made a fresh pot of tea, turned on some music, and settled down to reading when there’s a hard tap at the window. Then another; it’s not just a branch. 

He swings open the window. It’s a tawny barn owl, bearing a note from Potter that asks only, are you in?

Draco’s heart speeds up in his chest when he writes yes and ties the parchment back into the owl’s leg. When Draco gives it a treat, it nuzzles him and pushes its head under his hand to be scratched. It flies off and then Harry’s at his door in under a minute. He’s dripping wet. 

“I was standing outside,” he says. He casts a drying charm on himself and Draco can feel Harry’s magic without even touching him, can feel the warmth and thrum of it. 

Draco opens the door wide and Harry steps in. The owl swoops in past him, shaking her feathers and landing right on Mika’s old perch as though she belongs there. 

“Jojo likes you,” Harry says. Jojo couldn’t possibly make it more obvious, rolling her head, nudging Draco’s hand when he goes to pat her, fluffing her wings at him. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Jo.”

“I like her too,” Draco says, looking away from them both. “I just don’t know how to show it properly. I’ve never been good at showing it.”

Harry comes close, very close, and kisses him. 

It’s so brief that Draco barely has a chance to close his eyes. When he opens them again, Harry is still so near that Draco can hear him swallow and see the grain of his stubble. He can see the ring of darker green around the lighter grass-green of Harry’s irises, the warm brown around his pupil, the shadows beneath his eyes. 

Harry tastes of tea and travel, of chances that go far beyond second. He tastes like the better part of a lifetime of desire. It makes Draco think of experience, of rainy days and distant dragons and lonely nights under the same sky. 

***

Draco is 44, still, the same man he’s been. Yet he’s utterly changed by this night. 

Time feels elastic as he and Harry sit on the worn sofa, stoking the fire occasionally, talking and not. Harry says he’s come back to stay, that he’s tired of the expat life. He’s solid and he’s here in England, here in Draco’s cottage, at least for now, and that’s enough.

Harry is sitting close to him. It feels both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and Draco touches Harry’s arm and his blue-jeaned knee, leans into his side. He’s astounded that, after all this time, he’s allowed to touch. 

The pounding rain slows and stops around 3am, long after the time it’s clear they’ll be up through the night, that they’re _in_ this. They go into the kitchen to rummage around Draco’s cabinets and find stale chocolate biscuits, the package open for Merlin knows how long. Harry still has a sweet tooth. He wants honey in his tea. 

Draco looks out his big kitchen window, and realises that the stars have come out in force. He spells out the lights and he and Harry look up through the skylight. It’s impossibly clear, stars everywhere, and they stare up at them together for a moment before Draco can’t stand not looking at Harry again and he kisses him under the skylight. He puts his hands in Harry’s hair, salt and pepper hair, now, the black shot through with grey. 

Harry pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. They’re rectangular now, smaller than his old round pair. The frames are a rich chocolate brown flecked with gold, and they accent the squareness of Harry’s jaw. Draco wonders idly why he wears them instead of using a vision charm, if it’s because he realises the specs suit him. Some who knows him well must have helped him select them. Draco wonders who it was, a small stab of jealousy quick in his throat. 

“Hermione, of course,” Harry says, “and vision charms always give me a headache,” and fuck, Draco must be doing that thing again where he speaks his thoughts out loud in Harry’s presence, or else the line between their minds is thinner than Draco realises. 

“I’m not that good a Legilimens, believe me.” When Harry smiles, his eyes crinkle at the corners and Draco kisses the creases, he can’t help himself, he puts his mouth on every one, and then he softly brings his lips to each of Harry’s closed eyes. Bringing a protective hand to the back of Draco’s neck, Harry tugs him down so that their mouths meet again. 

When he can’t hold off any longer, Draco leads Harry to his bed and, without a word, pulls Harry on top of him. Draco feels, for the first time, Harry’s body stretched out against his own. He gives his hips a slow roll. Harry presses back and it’s just right, it’s perfect, it’s just how Draco had always imagined it would feel. 

Harry’s tongue is in Draco’s mouth now, more forceful, insisting, claiming him. Harry flings his glasses aside with more force than he needs and they hit the wall and clatter to the floor. Drawing his wand, Harry disappears their clothes and Draco feels the sweep of Harry’s magic against his skin. Wordlessly, he casts more charms and then tosses his wand carelessly aside too, and that’s when Draco knows that Harry trusts him. 

Harry cards his hands through Draco’s hair and slides them roughly everywhere over his body, like he’s running out of time. 

When Harry comes inside him, Draco holds his breath. 

Draco is 44 and he’s in love for the first time, with the same person he’s wanted all his life. 

***

Draco is 51. The sun is soft and high on the day he marries Harry. 

It’s a ridiculous thing, marriage, a fool’s errand that Draco doesn’t even believe in. He wants it anyway, wants it desperately.

They choose a spot overlooking the ocean, high up on the cliffs, with a small canopy and just a few friends in attendance. Luna does the ceremony. Blaise holds the rings. Molly Weasley cries. 

They put wild thistles in their lapels and promise themselves to each other under the bright May sky. Thready clouds skid along on a hard breeze that tells the story of the sea. 

Afterward, they Apparate home together, tired and happy. Harry smiles. His mouth still tastes of tea and honey, and all the chances Draco ever took.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration from the Josh Ritter song, "Change of Time": 
> 
> _I had a dream last night_  
>  _Rusting far below me_  
>  _Battered hulls and broken hardships_  
>  _Leviathan and lonely_  
>  _I was thirsty so I drank_  
>  _And though it was salt water_  
>  _There was something 'bout the way_  
>  _It tasted so familiar_  
>  _Time, love… time, love… time, love…_  
>  _It's only a change of time._


End file.
